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The Porn Convention

“You can’t write that,” Seymore Butts says the moment my hand moves to write down the two words he’s said, two words that summarize this story, that say everything there is to say, really, about the state of the adult movie industry, and one of the words is an expletive.

I’m sitting with Butts, born Adam Glasser in the Bronx, New York, 48 years ago, on two black plastic chairs inside of a square. Around the perimeter, porn stars sit on tall chairs at high tables signing glossy photos of themselves for patient men waiting in embarrassing lines.

The last time I saw Butts was for another story, and it was 11 years ago. I interviewed him in the living room of his ranch-style home with a kidney-shaped pool in the yard in the San Fernando Valley. His young son wandered into the room; his porn star girlfriend occupied herself in another part of the house. Back then the gonzo porno pioneer was in trouble with the Los Angeles Police Department, which had decided a movie Butts made, “Tampa Tushy-Fest Part 1,” was obscene.

Now things are different.

In the decade since, the adult movie industry has changed completely, and although Butts has gone off the record as I listen, he is telling me the story of everything that happened in between, and it’s a doozy.

I remember what it was like because I was there. The rise of the Internet was spreading porn across the planet like a virus. There were big budget feature movies, stunt sex videos in which lone women competed with one another to have sex with as many men as possible, and gonzo production studios cropping up like weeds across the Valley. With lightning speed, porn crossed over into the mainstream, and consumers couldn’t get enough. Or so it seemed.

A funny thing happened, though. Over the years that followed, porn became ubiquitous, the market was flooded with product, piracy ate up the porn industry’s profits, the Feds served a series of pornographers with a succession of obscenity indictments, and a recession swept across the globe.

By the time I sit down across from Butts at this porn convention on the second floor of the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Ill., over which a steady stream of jetliners descends into Chicago O’Hare International Airport less than a mile away, the adult movie business has transformed totally.

The porn industry as I knew it is dead. And it appears a new industry has arisen.

***

Xaq Fixx is a former Air Force cryptologist and precision-guided munitions specialist. He wears glasses, has a significant scar on his forehead of undetermined origin, and sports a Lenin-esque beard and mustache, the ends of which he twirls into curls.

Fixx is the market research manager for the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, an online adult company that bills itself on its website as “THE #1 ADULT VIDEO ON DEMAND THEATER IN THE WORLD!” Among other properties, AEBN owns PornoTube, an X-rated YouTube, and xPeeps, an adult webcam site that encourages users to “xpose yourself.” It also produces the product Fixx is hawking.

I stick my finger into the rubbery, flesh-colored slit on the side of a plastic grey peanut the size of a very large loaf of bread. This is RealTouch, an “award-winning male masturbator” designed by a former NASA engineer that syncs with adult movies to simulate sex for the male with which it is interacting through your computer’s USB port. The device retails for $325, and the package includes 120 RealTouch VOD minutes, anti-bacterial cleaner, and a 90-day limited warranty.

More recently, the company has begun marketing the RealTouch JoyStick, the lingam to the RealTouch’s yoni, which is to say it looks like a dildo. Available only to adult webcam models at this time, the joystick serves as a remote control for the RealTouch device, enabling users in remote locations to have “True Internet Sex™!”

Per Fixx’s instruction, Savannah Steele, a busty blonde porn star in a lab coat, moves the joystick, and the mechanism tightens around my finger and increases speed.

“It feels like having sex with a robot,” I announce. I extract my finger and wipe it off with a wet wipe from the box on the table.

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How does no one comment on this… it is about porn and business. That is all that happens on 80% of men’s computers. I’d say Porn has a negative effect on men’s and women’s self confidence, until men and women can learn to enjoy it together. Just like Viagra bombed (directed and Men) and Cialis rocked (directed at the couple). The first person in the porn industry that makes porn for couples and finds a marketing channel both are comfortable to share. It will do well.

However the underlying issue is the insecurity it brings into a relationship if the relationship is not a fully honest one to begin with. No relationship starts out with that kind of honesty, and it hurts couples early on in their relationship journey. Some couples stay in the stigmatism that porn is for you and you alone, but when shared it is the best experience ever.

The question the porn industry needs to answer to make money again is: How do you make couples feel confident enough to share the experience. And how can you profit from a shared experience Then they will see serious money again.. at least for bit.

This is a good primer for a business publication, but allow me to address the direction in which demand is pushing pornography. “Gonzo” and other extreme forms–genres formerly reserved for the fringe niches–are becoming mainstream as a younger generation hungers for more intensity and, in effect, violence.

As David Foster Wallace wrote in “Consider the Lobster,” the inevitable conclusion of this direction is the snuff film; when a barrier is pushed and pushed again those pushing it become rabidly insatiable and the process only accelerates.

This wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t affecting an entire generation, but it is. I’m not a saint–probably more depraved than average–but even I can see the infected morality inherent in real footage of verbal and physical violence during sex. You could say that they are actors, and as such it’s no different or even less violent than the average action movie, but if you ever watch some gonzo it is clearly not hollywood; the punches are not pulled and the sound fx are real-time, along with the honestly scared expression on the women’s faces while being choked and spit upon.

It’s downright disturbing and made worse by the idea that some guys get hard from it. However, they only do so in the solitude of their simultaneous guilt and lust, rage and loathing. For this reason, the whole thing is invisible. You would never know it’s there because nobody openly discusses it and you can only find it if you go looking. But like a cancer, it is upon our young men eroding their virtue and damning their futures to epitomize the old insult: jerk-offs.

Apologies for going off-topic, but this business really is those “two words” you omitted from the beginning. Underlined.

Another interesting and sad way the adult movie business has transformed: hiring “copyright trolls” to scour the internet collecting I.P. numbers and threatening lawsuits under DMCA.

The “notice” containing threats and demands for settlement is sent to the Internet Service Provider, which is then forwarded to the user.

Sometimes the copyright trolls file subpoenas to get user info (name and contact info) from the Internet Service Providers, so they can threaten litigation if users don’t settle. Most want to avoid the embarrassment, and the potentially huge penalties allowed for under DMCA The settlements are a cash cow which has effectively turned the courts into a tool for the pornographers to profit.

What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loose his soul. I just want to draw your attention to the fact that, God has set a day to judge mankind whatever he did on this planet. Therefore we are to submit ourselves to him for righteousness not for unrighteousness like pornography. Your bodies are for Christ, and when you destroy them, God will also destroy you. Above all remember that, God loves you so much and so He sent His Son Jesus to come and die for you. It is a privilege, accept Him now and you will jot face any judgement. He stands at the door of your heart and He is knocking, allow Him to come in. Pornography is evil and leads to death, is not an accomplishment as someone said, but with Jesus Christ, you have life. God’s Grace be with you.